An Investigation Into Factors Affecting Postgraduate Pre-Service English Teachers’ Interactive Instructional Decisions During The Practicum

The pedagogical decision-making has been considered as one of important skills that teacher have to master. It is also a cognitive process where teacher processes relevant information on teaching activities to make judgments for reaching instructional decisions. Researches have been focused on its nature, characteristics and the reasons affecting it. To explore the underlying reason behind teacher’s instructional actions is to know how they collect information cues and integrate them into shaping judgments and decisions. Different teachers’instructional decisions would result in different teaching outcome. Thus the study and description of reasons affecting teachers’decision-making are really important for evaluating the effectiveness of a class and for the professional development of teacher for the ability to make valuable instructional decisions is a hallmark being a good teacher. This study aims to find out what and how the multiple reasons impact on shaping interactive pedagogical decision-making of one special group—pre-service EFL teachers in the context of China.In doing so, this study chooses six postgraduates from foreign language department in Normal University of Central China as research subjects who enrolled in the teacher education program and participated one and a half month practicum in middle schools. The study collects data using videos to tape their class teaching practice and stimulus recall interviews to probe the reasons behind these student teachers’interactive teaching behavior. The research framework is based on a modified version of categories scheme developed by Johnson (1992) that was based on the classification scheme created by Fogarty et al. (1983). By drawing on perspective of social context and individual level on examining the multiple reasons, this study discussed personal reasons and contextual reasons related to decision-making. Therefore, through analysis of data collected in this study, the reasons reported for decision-making can be divided into three major categories, namely the instructional goals student teachers considered in classroom teaching, their prior knowledge they incorporated into decision-making and the individual reasons of their personal inclination.This study points in promising directions by suggesting the importance of training student teachers to know about their own cognitive thinking while making instructional decisions and to learn about how to make a successful instructor for their professional development. Meantime, this study could also provide teacher educators a more comprehensive framework to build a better system for training student teachers.